`Irving, your floor squeaks," says Miles Davis. "Yeah?" comes the laconic response from record producer Irving Townsend. The exchange comes near the end of recording Kind of Blue, by common consent the finest jazz album of all time. Voted number one album in last year's Century Jazz Poll conducted by The Irish Times and the Improvised Music Company, and Album of the Century by London's Independent, beating the likes of the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Stravinsky and Frank Sinatra, it is one of several albums that comprise the new box set of Miles Davis and John Coltrane's The Complete Columbia Recordings.
Except for one false start, every tune on Kind of Blue had been completed in one take until Flamenco Sketches, when Davis decided to go for it again. His quip, amid audible giggles from his band, came just before he counted off the second version, breaking the tension and producing the master take that would eventually appear on the album. His remarks are one of the remarkable footnotes to history that abound in this collection, which also includes the classic Davis albums Round About Midnight, Mile- stones, Someday My Prince Will Come, two live concerts and 18 previously unreleased tracks that total 90 minutes of new material.
The remarkable thing about this collection is that none of it would have been recorded if Miles Davis had had his way. When he formed his quintet in April 1955 for an engagement in Philadelphia, his first choice saxophonist was Sonny Rollins. But five months later Rollins decided to move to Chicago, so John Gilmore was tried in his stead, but failed to impress Davis. John Coltrane was third choice, a journeyman saxophonist living in Philadelphia who hitherto had enjoyed a remarkably low profile in jazz.
Coltrane had played with Dizzy Gillespie and worked in the rhythm and blues bands of Eddie Vinson, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges, amongst others. Until he joined Davis, his only solo on record since his career began in the late 1940s was on a novelty blues number with Gillespie, We Love to Boogie. In his autobiography, Davis admitted he "wasn't excited" at the prospect of hiring his new tenor saxophonist.
Yet Coltrane proved to be a quick study, and Davis became fascinated as much by the daring of his conception as his abrasive tone, which he recognised provided a perfect contrast to his trumpet sound. "Faster than I could imagine, the music that we were playing together was just unbelievable," he said.
The Columbia set opens in October 1955, with Davis shaping his musical outlook for the next 10 years - the plaintive, harmony-muted trumpet on ballads contrasted by aggressively swinging standards.
Equally, Coltrane's puritan aesthetics of austerity (hard tone) and hard work (a desire to play every note in every chord) were already in evidence. Yet the Davis/Coltrane combination was scarcely a union made in heaven. In April 1957, with the group widely recognised the boss group in jazz, Davis, a recovered drug addict, was forced to fire Coltrane, who had become addicted to hard drugs. His replacement was Sonny Rollins.
In fact, the group was disbanded four times in its first 27 months. By September Rollins had left again, to form his own group, and in December 1957 Coltrane returned. He was rejuvenated, due in part to a period spent in the Thelonious Monk Quartet as much as kicking the drug habit. Piece by piece, the scene was gradually being set for Davis's great triumph when Julian `Cannonball' Adderley on alto saxophone re-joined the band the same month. On the title track of the Milestones album, Davis experiments with modes, specifically the Dorian and Aeolian, that provided a drastically simplified harmonic base on which base jazz improvisation and jazz improvisation is based. This was of special fascination to Coltrane, whose questing solo and aggressive virtuosity point to future triumphs. Yet key to its success is the way the improvisations sustain the mood set by the ensemble passages. In the spring of 1958, pianist Bill Evans joined Davis, and his group stood on the threshold of greatness.
Davis conceived Kind of Blue with Evans in mind. What he wanted to do was recreate the feel of the black religious music he had heard as a child on visits to Arkansas. To the extent the album did not convey this feeling, Davis felt it was not a success. Posterity, however, has visited a different view. Remarkably for an unreconstructed contemporary jazz album, Kind of Blue has been heard in films and on television as the ultimate hip dinner music and suave post-coitial music - and has even been importuned to inspire executive consumerism as the soundtrack for an advert selling expensive production cars.
For most of 1999, Kind of Blue topped Billboard's jazz chart, which may say a lot where jazz is today, but also speaks of an enduring appeal. Yet remarkably on an album as well known as this, things were not what they appeared to be. The first four tracks, recorded on March 2nd 1959 were with a tape machine that was running slightly slow. It meant that when transferred at normal speed, So What, Freddie Free- loader, and Blue in Green became about a quarter tone sharp, and for decades musicians wondered what Miles had in mind.
This anomaly was finally rectified on a 1992 CD reissue, when back-up tapes at the right speed were discovered. They are corrected on this box set. Confusion doesn't stop there, however: in his autobiography, Davis claims to have composed all the tunes on the session.
What the liner notes don't tell you is that Bill Evans adapted his famous Peace Piece, itself taken from the pianist's own introduction to Some Other Time, to Flamenco Sketches, while All Blues comes from the riff Ahmad Jamal sets up in the middle of his 1958 recording of Autumn Leaves.
But they notes do say that the harmony of Blue in Green came from Davis in the form of two chord symbols, around which Evans constructed the unusual 10-bar tune. Davis and Evans share composer credit.
Elsewhere in the set, Davis's version of Bronislav Kaper's On Green Dolphin Street made it a part of the standard jazz repertoire and, together with Coltrane's Parthian shot with Davis, Someday My Prince Will Come, are numbers that can be revisited again and again without destroying the inherent freshness of their execution. And that's what this whole collection is about, jazz that remains fresh and vibrant every time you play it.
Maybe that's as good a working definition of a jazz classic as you're likely to get. If so, every tune on each of the six CDs is a classic. Now that's real value for money.
Miles Davis and John Coltrane, The Complete Columbia Recordings is released by Columbia/Legacy (C6K 65833).